“... has both social and absolute self, a Wordsworthian ‘sentiment of being’ (in his two essays on Wordsworth Trilling makes the same point about him). ‘The sentiment of being’ – Wordsworth’s phrase from The Prelude – is what Laskell rediscovers when he falls ill. This romanticism, even hero-worship, about the ...”

“... violence) they buy out. The poet Penfield, who once asserted his independence by semaphoring Wordsworth on the battlefield, ends a kept man whose sterile chef d’oeuvre is Loon lake, published by the Grebe Press: ‘Loon Lake NY 1939. No reviews’. Joe and Penfield, master and laureate of Loon Lake, are as possessed and exploited by the Bennett class ...”

“... however different to his own – in the English poets who have been most conscious of him. Wordsworth said of Goethe that he was not spontaneous enough, and the tradition of English poetry, even before the romantic revival, is towards, as it were, the joyful rush of words, the pleasure in language and in the immediacy of feeling, as plain in the ...”

“... poets with a more activist or ‘illocutionary’ conception of their art: Blake rather than Wordsworth, or the Language poets rather than some more traditionalist poets now writing in America. But his overriding concern is to insist on a critical method which recognises that all poems, not just activist ones, are ‘social acts’ which cannot be ...”

“... just and instructive distinction between Walter Scott, prepared to compromise with his public, and Wordsworth, not so prepared; then realises that this is just the distinction that Leavis would have made and, instead of welcoming Leavis as an ally, marks out his distinction from him by talking of his ‘commination and pulpitry’; only to end and cancel out ...”

“... advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly observed’. He accepts Hazlitt’s judgments as ...”

“... innovation of constructing an interlocking system of classes, terms and names was so significant, William Whewell argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific ...”

“... of his subjects. If mystics can do so much with repetition and the word and, then why can’t we? William James speaks of that ‘vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism’. Some people can do cartwheels and other people have to do that thing where they put down their hands and then kind of hop off the ground. This feels more like the ...”

“... gentlemen entered, one of whom I knew by intuition to be called Dr Charles Brandon and another William Locksley Esq.’ At this probationary stage, we are treated to imperial adventures and aristocratic love affairs in exotic locales, not all of which would win the approval of the post-colonial critic: ‘Tringia lay at my feet, dissolved in peaceful ...”

“... nation’. Ransom had recruited scholars and writers like Roger Shattuck, Donald Carne-Ross, William Arrowsmith and others who would have been more likely to land in the Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant Swedish poet and fiction ...”

“... admirers Edward Irving and Francis Jeffrey, and winding up with more controlled recollections of Wordsworth, Southey, ‘Christopher North’ (John Wilson) and Sir William Hamilton. Central to the work are the memories of Jane, offered in their original tumbled disorder – a disorder which the present editors, unlike ...”

“... also the visionary politics of a tenacious high Romanticism, moved by a primitive disgust at what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending’. His phrasing sometimes sounds rather like William Blake, whose name and example as a London poet crops up quite a lot, or like Coleridge at his most indignant: this is a story of ...”

“... to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris gave William Price was one pound; that Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly lyrical, should ...”

“... the next flow’rs, that deck the Spring,    Bloom on my peaceful grave!Twenty-six years later, Wordsworth had a go. His rhythms were awkward and strained, and his rhymes no better, but he too was concerned with writing a melancholy ballad about the long years of confinement and the terrible end of one who had been so exalted:Hark! The death-note of the ...”